Passing Configuration Data to the Master Page in ASP.NET MVC

aweiker

One of the common activities that I have found myself doing lately whenever I create a new project is to identify a way of loading configuration information and customizing the behavior of the Master Page. The way I initially went about solving this problem was to create a base class and have all of my Page ViewModel’s inherit from it. This caused two different things that I had to constantly maintain, making sure all of my ViewModel’s inherited from this MasterViewModel and then remembering to set the data every time a ViewResult is returned in an Action.

    public class MasterViewModel : IMasterViewModel
    {
        public string SiteName { get; set; }
    }

I was able to take care of the second concern by simply creating a base controller that all of my controllers would inherit from and then override View(string viewName, string masterName, object model) { … } so that the settings are automatically injected into the model.

        protected override ViewResult View(string viewName, string masterName, object model)
        {
            ((MasterViewModel)model).SiteName = "Example";
            return base.View(viewName, masterName, model);
        }

In order to get around the smell of forcing my ViewModel’s to inherit from a base class I put the MasterViewModel into the ViewData dictionary that is returned in the ViewResult.

        protected override ViewResult View(string viewName, string masterName, object model)
        {
            ViewResult result = base.View(viewName, masterName, model);

            result.ViewData[Data.Site] = _blogConfiguration.Configuration;

            return result;
        }

Once I had this in place, I created a new ViewMasterPage with a property that exposed the data that was put into ViewData. This then allowed me to have a strongly typed referenced from the Master Page.

<%@ Import Namespace="Azure.Domain.Models"%>
<%@ Master Language="C#" Inherits="Azure.Web.Views.ViewMasterPage" %>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
    <title><%= SiteConfiguration.Name %><asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="TitleContent" runat="server" /></title>
    <link href="../../Content/Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
    <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.1.min.js" type="text/javascript" language="javascript"></script>
    <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery.Validate/1.6/jQuery.Validate.min.js" type="text/javascript" language="javascript"></script>
    <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="HeaderContent" runat="server" />
</head>
 
<body>
    <div id="header">
        <h1><%= SiteConfiguration.Name %></h1>
    </div>
    
    <div id="main">
        <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="MainContent" runat="server" />
    </div>

    <div id="footer">
        ©<%= DateTime.UtcNow.Year %> <%= SiteConfiguration.Owner %>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

All examples are taken from the work I have been doing as a part of creating my own blog engine on Azure. You can track my progress and grab source code on my AzureBlog project site on CodePlex.

Tuesday, February 02, 2010 Comments

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Passing Configuration Data to the Master Page in ASP.NET MVC